The comment thread on my last post (see 9/17/08) has me seriously jonesing for a good Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead quote match. For those of you unfamiliar with the play and/or movie, it's essentially an absurdist retelling of Hamlet from the vantage point of the two minor characters made titular ("of a title," you perverts). It's a fave. It's often the fave, depending on mood, time of day, strength of coffee and relative distance of Saturn from Venus. So, some favorite quotes, checked against Wikiquote, from which even more can be found...
Rosencrantz
"Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure."
"Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect."
"We'll be all right. I suppose we just go on."
Guildenstern (clearly the part I want)
"I mean, you wouldn't bet on it. I mean, I would, but you wouldn't."
"It must be indicative of something besides the redistribution of wealth."
"What could we possibly have in common except our situation?"
"All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it's like being ambushed by a grotesque."
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
"Don't you discriminate at all?!"
"If we had a destiny, then so had he, and if this is ours, then that was his, and if there are no explanations for us, then let there be none for him."
"...now you see him, now you don't, that's the only thing that's real..."
"Pragmatism. Is that all you have to offer?"
"No, no, no…death is not. Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat."
The Player
"The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means."
"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."
"We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style."
"Hamlet…in love…with the old man's daughter…the old man…thinks."
Cobbled dialogue
"So there you are...stark, raving sane..."
"I don't believe in it anyway ... What? ... England. ... Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?"
2 comments:
My friend mel has 3 sons. Hunter, Shepherd and Carter. Don and I call him Cartographer. No one else laughs but we're endlessly amused by it.
Keep him away from conspiracies. That name inspires many innapropriate nicknames. Cartiledge. Carcinagens. Cart-before-the-horse. Remind me not to name my kid Carter...
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